Waiting and Hoping for the Light
Waiting and Hoping for the Light
On this first Sunday of Advent, as darkness grows, I'm waiting and hoping for the return of the light.
The afternoon sun slipped out of sight even before the light gave way to darkness. I stared at the tree line astonished by how fast the sun seemed to be moving, as if it had somewhere to be. With the absence of its warmth, a chill crept up on me. Even on this 55-degree November day, I zipped up my down vest. The temperature would be falling fast now to its nighttime low in the 30s. I miss the sun already.
Every year, I dread the fall time change. Yes, we get an extra hour of sleep the weekend when we “fall back,” but I grieve the loss of the evening light.
From the summer solstice in June till the winter solstice in December, we lose, where I live, a minute or so of light a day. That means a five-hour difference—14 hours and 45 minutes of light in June as compared to 9 hours and 34 minutes in December. Some places fare even worse. Residents of Barrow, Alaska, for example, lose all their light for two months of the year. I would not do well there. Even after a day of Virginia sunshine, as dusk turns to dark each evening, I’m longing for the light’s return.
Making peace with the dark
Maybe that’s because I haven’t found a way to make peace with the darkness. I love walking in the woods on nights when the full moon is so bright that creatures of the night have nowhere to hide. The moon illuminates the secret ways of the forest typically unseen by diurnal beings like you and me. But that same forest is a much more foreboding place when the moon has none of the sun’s light to reflect down to Earth. Darkness evokes danger, emptiness, uncertainty, mystery, and fear.
I am not a fear-filled person by nature, but when I find myself in darkness, a heaviness comes over me, and I struggle to find meaning or clarity in it. As soon as darkness descends, I find it hard to be motivated to do anything besides immerse myself in the light and sounds of an engaging television show.
My friends tell me that they relish the darkness as a time of introspection, reflection, and quiet. I try to reframe it that way for me but, I have to admit, it’s a constant struggle. This meditation by author Meg Casey speaks to how I’d like to experience December—an aspiration that eludes me all too often.
December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark, silky silence that descends so early that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds — that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives — I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again.
Re-embracing Advent
One of the ways I’ve moved toward better acceptance of darkness of December is by re-embracing the season on Advent. I say re-embracing because as a Catholic kid, I loved Advent. I relished decorating the house, wrapping presents, helping my mom bake cookies, practicing carols with the church choir, marking each day off on an Advent calendar, and all the other stuff that went into preparing for Jesus’s birthday.
Unlike Lent, which always felt to me like waiting for doomsday—even if it did culminate with Jesus’s glorious resurrection—Advent meant that coming of the savior, my savior, was close at hand. I loved the fantastical story of a young woman who—presumably with her husband’s help—gives birth in a lowly stable far away from home and not only survives it but is visited by angles who herald her infant’s birth. The tale, which, as a child, I believed to be 100% factual, spoke to my sense of adventure, wonder, and possibility.
Advent was a holy time that we celebrated on the four Sundays before Christmas with the lighting of candles. They became my light in the December darkness, and reclaiming that tradition brings me hope that the light will return.
Only after I left the Catholic Church behind and came to understand the Christmas story as more allegory than fact did I learn about the roots of this season I loved.
The roots of Advent
Advent, which translates to “the coming,” has been observed by early Christians since the 4th century, CE. Then, it was time of preparation for baptism and conversion to the nascent Christian faith.
By the Middle Ages, Christians used the time from the Feast of St. Martin on November 11 to Christmas Day to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. During that time, the season was a lot more like Lent—a contemplative, quiet time. Some Christian churches still observe the longer Advent season as a time of prayer and fasting.
However, it’s important to remember that wreaths and the lighting of candles in the darkness of December began centuries earlier as a pagan ritual. The evergreen wreaths symbolize life, and the candles foretell the coming of the light.
Although I struggle with the dark days of this season, lighting Advent candles in a wreath in the middle of our dining room table, center and ground me as I wait for the light’s return.
The themes of Advent
Each of the four weeks of Advent focuses our attention on a different theme. The traditional themes are hope, peace, joy, and love. Because I’m such a traditionalist (OK, not so much, but still), over the course of the next four weeks, I thought I’d share my thoughts about each of these themes and what they mean to me. I hope these reflections provide you with some new ways to look at each of these common ideas that are meaningful to you.
A few words about hope
The first week of Advent is a meditation on hope. Even though, and maybe because I struggle with darkness, I’m a hopeful person. Former President Barack Obama ran on a platform of hope and, even though some people thought he was foolish for doing so, I agree with and try to live by President Obama’s definition of hope.
For him and for me, hope is not a passive thing. I can’t just sit around and hope that things will get better. Hope requires action, attention, and commitment. That’s how I try to live my life. Even when I get discouraged, even when the darkness overtakes me, even when it’s hard to remember the light, I try to muster the courage to keep working for justice, to demand equity, and to hold on to the hope. I truly believe that someday we’ll find our way to that world over the rainbow where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
That’s my hope for us all this first week of Advent.
I leave you today with a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” sung by LGBTQ patrons of a Provincetown nightclub in 2016, on the afternoon after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. I’ve never experienced a more profound expression of hope.
What is your hope for this Advent season?